> We need something like Emacs, but a well designed Emacs.
Wow. This is brilliant. Nobody ever. Not once. Not even theoretically. Nobody in 50 years of Emacs' existence ever tried that. Not a single programmer ever said this or attempted to do this. With exception of insignificant fools such as XEmacs, Zmacs, Hemlock, Climacs, Edwin, JEmacs, Yi, Lem, Guile Emacs, Remacs, emacs-ng, and the eleven thousand config frameworks that were going to fix it from the inside. I salute your effort, and may the spirit of your burned tokens please the digital gods and may they accept your sacrifice. Godspeed.
Buddy, I did. I did. And I can rant for a quite a while for why the opinions there have jack squat of sound reasoning. On [almost] every single point there.
What I love about Vim and Emacs is that they taught me humility. I am grateful to my younger self for forcing me to learn them, deeply. They cut my enormously inflated hubris down to size, and I believe they made me not only a better programmer but a better person. I won't tell you to try that path, because that would sound patronizing, and would undo this entire paragraph.
It turns out there already is a legal precedent for this. It's called the 4th Amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
US v. Arnold was a Ninth Circuit ruling, and was later superseded in its own circuit by US. v Cotterman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Cotterman), which ruled that a "forensic" search does not fall within the scope of routine border inspection, and does require individual suspicion.
This was backed up with even more rulings like US v. Kolusz in the Fourth Circuit. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on this specific question, but has issued other general rulings about cell phone data, like Riley v. California, which determined that data on a cell phone is protected by the Fourth Amendment against warrantless search and seizure.
If the case in the article makes its way up to SCOTUS, it's not unreasonable to expect that the court will combine multiple districts' established precedent that "forensic searches" are not covered by any border exception with its own recent precedent protecting cell phone data, and rule that demanding unrestricted access to phone data without reasonable suspicion is unconstitutional.
It's based on the interpretation of "unreasonable" and while the current rules may be far from perfect I don't think interpreting routine border searches as categorically "unreasonable" is better.
“Reasonable” and the current definition of what the government considers reasonable are entirely separate things. The entire state of Florida is currently defined as on the US border, that’s effectively a meaningless definition.
Further, in what way is the content of someone’s cellphone relevant at a border specifically? Inspecting luggage for cocaine at an entry point makes sense, but physical borders mean little in the face of the internet. You might as well just erase the phone before crossing the border.
The Supreme Court has generally upheld searches at the border being reasonable (along with a lot of other IMO unreasonable things being reasonable).
If you’re expecting the Courts to bail him out, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The gov’t can make an argument here this is like trying (and succeeding) at flushing, say, a bag of cocaine in the bathroom when you see the cops coming.
Something which the Courts also historically disapprove of, by the way.
What constitutes a "routine border search" that would be permitted for the purposes of customs enforcement, however, is something that is hotly debated, and that the courts have clarified in recent decisions such as US v. Cotterman and US v. Koluz does not include "forensic searches" without the standard Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion criterion being met.
Thanks for the case references! These came after my legal training and so I hadn’t studied those. They narrow the border search doctrine somewhat. Good to know.
Well, of late, what was considered settled law is being reinterpreted at a remarkable rate, so maybe there is hope for this 'settled' law to be overturned....
Like what? The big one people always try to bring up when they make coy statements like this is Roe v. Wade but no one thought that was a strong ruling. Even later justices who were strong proponents of women's right to chose like Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought it was a shit ruling.
Roe v Wade and the resulting multi-decade clusterfuck is because your Congress are weak-willed pussies who are unable to actually work through a legislative process to find a consensus.
Yes, it took decades, but in Australia our various states have worked through the "it's criminal" -> "It's criminal but not enforced" -> "we're deliberately vague and won't prosecute doctors" -> "we have a legal framework that makes abortion legal up to {20,22,24} weeks on demand, after which it requires the consensus of two independent medical opinions".
The US needs to do the same. Yes, it will take decades. No, it shouldn't because abortion is a medical procedure, but religion is a scourge.
The Roberts court is nakedly partisan and makes rulings as necessary to expand and protect Republican power (e.g. they protected Trump’s reelection with rulings with carveouts allowing them to decide the other way if a Democratic president tried a similar argument in the future). You should not bet on a reinterpretation of existing law here moving in a direction you’d like.
Interesting. What, then, do you make of the extensive rulings that the current court has issued to block or overturn Trump's actions?
How do you reconcile your 'nakedly partisan' theory with the court rulings that, for example, overruled Trumps attempt to use the AEA for immigration enforcement, overruled his attempt to deploy the National Guard without the consent of state governments, overruled his attempts to unilaterally impose tariffs, overruled his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, and so on?
Note the use of “Republican” in the comment you’re replying to: they are trying to walk a fine line between protecting the guy who gave them the votes needed to do things like Roberts’ career-long goal of rolling back the VRA while protecting the core of the party (e.g. the inconsistent logic used to protect the Federal Reserve, which all of the monied interests wanted, but none of the other independent agencies; or the tariffs, which are deeply unpopular with most businesses) or permanently grant powers they don’t want a Democratic president to use (e.g. deploy the national guard over a governor’s wishes).
Things like birthright citizenship are a good example of that latter concept: the law is extremely clear there so they ruled against him because the only alternative would be declaring outright that the President is not bound by the constitution, but in many other cases they’ve made quite unusual actions to preempt lower courts before either finding a new executive power or, where the law is clear, stalling to allow things like deportations to proceed in the interim before ruling against.
I mean if it were me? Yep. I'm in a city that borders Canada, and pretty much anywhere i go is "the border" despite my current route to the nearest bridge being about 45 minutes. I personally feel it's a little ridiculous that CBP has jurisdiction in my neighborhood.
So if you really want to nab someone but you don't care what the charge is, you can threaten them with a 4th Amendment-violating search, which induces them to destroy evidence. Pretty neat trick.
IANAL, but I don't think it's controversial to say that people who treat the Bill of Rights like an obstacle to be hacked around probably shouldn't be in positions of power.
(IAAL, this is not legal advice, consult your own attorney)
If you destroy evidence, that’s your own fault. You can’t blame law enforcement for inducing you to commit crimes they didn’t ask you to commit. That’s just silly and no court will entertain that theory.
To protect your rights under the 4th Amendment, you refuse the search. If law enforcement conducts the search anyway and a court finds the search was unlawful, the court will exclude the evidence found in the search from consideration in the trial along with any evidence that flows from that. Neither the jury nor the court will be able to use it.
IANAL, but I've heard that entrapment defenses are way harder to use, and much rarer, in reality than on TV.
First, you frequently require a judge's permission to even argue it.
But the real burden is showing that your client would not have committed the crime without the effect of the police. A cop posing as a drug dealer and offering you drugs as you pass them in the park every day doesn't count; a cop hounding you for months to commit wire fraud because they mistakenly believe you're in a criminal org might, though.
> It can’t be destroying evidence if there’s no case or charge being pressed for which that material would be evidence.
(IAAL, not legal advice, consult your own lawyer)
Where’d you get that idea? That’s not the law. As soon as there is reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, and the law enforcement encounter occurs, that’s the threshold for when preservation of evidence begins. It doesn’t matter whether it might not have ultimately resulted in a criminal charge. You cannot intentionally interfere with a lawful investigation, in any way, full stop.
It’s a subject of debate. CBP stated it was possession of CSAM. Defendant claims it’s a pretext and that CBP was really investigating his ties with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement.
But it doesn’t really matter in this case. You cannot interfere with a lawful investigation, full stop. It’s not clear to me that even if the search was unlawful that the defendant will be held not guilty of the underlying tampering/destruction charge, since we already have a mechanism to suppress evidence obtained unlawfully.
Updating my initial statement: to search someone’s phone at the border, the government needs reasonable suspicion that the person has committed or is planning to commit a crime.
That’s not true. US citizens maintain their constitutional rights at the border. That has been tested in court. This is not the case for non-US person.
> I'm sorry, but the Fourth Amendment does not protect against the intentional destruction of evidence.
It seems to be more true than it did a couple of decades ago, what with more recent rulings like US v. Cotterman and US. v. Koluz better clarifying what counts as a routine border searches vs. more in-depth "forensic" searches that require individual suspicion.
> I'm sorry, but the Fourth Amendment does not protect against the intentional destruction of evidence.
Certainly not. But, of course, something can only be evidence in relation to a specific crime that is being investigated. If you aren't already a suspect in a crime, then the data on your phone wasn't evidence in the first place.
Look at the username. You're talking to gpt5 smoking tokens. It's hallucinating "evidence," whatever that's supposed to mean. It doesn't recognize that the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect against law enforcement fishing expeditions that lets the government intimidate people for having the "wrong" political views and invent pretexts for further harassment.
I wonder if it's primarily that developers are too lazy to design anything? I remember low-quality developers relying on Bootstrap and not making a modicum of effort to design a website.
Of course, if you're that lazy, you're going to surround yourself and industry with AI-generated websites and UI, and you're going to recognize it, so...
I'm setting up my new blog right now. I'm thinkin of having a toggle to "hide" ai generated content from my main list of writing, and labeling (and a disclaimer at the toop of each ai-generated post a message).
Not trying to self-promote, but honsetly trying to leverage AI when appropriate, and to also not take away from my hand-written articles that are typically my thoughts and opinions....
Very cool. I also like making websites with Hugo, and I have thought a lot about different theme vendoring methods, and how to retain ease of updating and testing your theme.
Yeah this is a battle and it's why governments decide to spend resources on this. Protectionism won't help America, American needs to compete. There's a general consensus that open source AI must win because people don't want to end up as slaves to a megacorp, so if you're anti-open source AI you're not gonna fare well.
FWIW I appreciate people like the author's old self. I am one of those who hates and simultaneously appreciates being corrected when I'm mistaken. I hate being mistaken and I appreciate the opportunity to correct the mistake.
While much of what the author says is true, I'm not so cynical as to think that it's impossible to change others.
The fact that you can change yourself — as the author acknowledges — means you can change others, because much of self-change comes from your observation of others. Perhaps it's the approach that matters most.
I wrote this article a while back on how to build a great terminal editor that's better than Emacs and VIM [1], you might find it interesting!
[1] https://gist.github.com/taoeffect/086220456e736cceb30d68834d...
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